You make a big pot of soup on Sunday, eat it twice, and freeze the rest in one old ice cream tub. Three weeks later you want a single bowl for lunch, and the only way to get it is to defrost the whole block. So it sits in the fridge for a day, you eat soup four days running, and the last of it goes in the bin.
The fix is boring but it works: freeze in portions from the start. Bags laid flat are one way. If you’d rather not wrestle hot soup into a zip bag, a portion tray is the tidier way.
What Souper Cubes actually are
Souper Cubes are chunky silicone trays with lids, a bit like an oversized ice cube tray. The 1 cup version comes as a 2-pack, and each tray is split into four 1 cup blocks. There are fill lines inside at half a cup and a full cup, marked in both cups and millilitres, so you can do smaller portions for a toddler or a side of rice.
You ladle the soup in, clip the lid on, freeze it, then push the blocks out from underneath. Most people then tip the frozen blocks into a big freezer bag and use the tray again for the next batch. That’s the trick that makes it worth having: the tray isn’t storage, it’s a mould.
A few things set them apart from a cheap no-name tray:
- Platinum-cured, food-grade silicone with a steel-reinforced rim, so a full tray doesn’t fold in half when you carry it to the freezer.
- Safe in the freezer, microwave and dishwasher, and in the oven up to 415°F (about 210°C) with the lid off.
- Lids fit on tight enough that the trays stack.
That rim is worth more than it sounds. Plain silicone trays are floppy, and a floppy tray full of liquid is how you end up wiping chilli off the freezer drawer.
Other things worth freezing in blocks
Once you’ve got a stack of them, you start freezing everything in blocks. Cooked rice, bolognese, stock, chickpeas, porridge, even mashed overripe bananas for baking later. A single 1 cup block of rice and one of curry makes a decent lunch, and you only take out what you’ll eat.
A few honest niggles
They’re big. Check your freezer drawer depth before you buy, because two filled trays plus lids take up real room until you’ve emptied the blocks into a bag. Tomato-heavy sauces can tint the silicone over time, which is cosmetic but annoying on a bright aqua tray. And let the food cool first. Pouring boiling soup into anything and putting it straight in the freezer isn’t great for the food or the freezer.
If you batch cook at all, this is one of the more useful things you can put in a kitchen drawer. Souper Cubes 1 cup trays on Amazon.
